


Ushel

by emh28



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Alternate Universe, Angst, Anya Lives, Child Death, Concentration Camps, Daddy Issues, Depression, East Berlin, Family, Gen, Holocaust, Journalist, Reunions, Soviet Union, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 22:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2126667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emh28/pseuds/emh28
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(She gives him a square of red cloth to remember her. He gives her a coin. Sharing their burdens as families should.)</p><p>Or: Anya Lehnsherr survived the fire, but Erik had no idea.</p><p>Warning: Graphic depictions of Nazi concentration camps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ushel

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Graphic depictions of Nazi concentration camps.
> 
> Four days later and countless cups of coffee and... this monster of a oneshot.
> 
> I mixed up parts of Comic!Erik and Movie!Erik and I tried my best to make him as non-OOC as possible. The main change is his age. My fic makes him 45 at the end of DOFP instead of 42. (Either way, he's an incredibly good looking middle-aged man.) Also, Anya was born in 1945 and the fire occured in 1946 when Erik was 18.
> 
> Title is the romanization of the Russian word for "Gone".
> 
> I tried to make this as historically accurate as possible, so any mistakes are my own. Comment or message me on Tumblr any questions you might have.
> 
> Enjoy!

(When he is a boy no taller than his father’s knee, Erik Lehnsherr name is Max.)

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Max Eisenhardt is the only son of Heinrich and Aleida, a storekeeper and seamstress respectively, from Düsseldorf. He is a cheerful little boy with chubby, pink cheeks that grandmothers love to pinch. He plays adventurers with two other boys from down the street, Rolf and Benno. Benno’s mother watches Max and Rolf when their mothers go to work. On sunny days they run through the streets, bumping into bystanders and imitating _Reichswehr_ officers. These are the best days of Max’s life.

Until they are not.

Benno’s mother stops watching Max and Rolf stops coming by to see him. One Saturday his uncle shows up at temple with a broken nose and a split lip. His mother loses her job at the dress shop where she worked for ten years. People on the street glare at Max’s father when they go out. His parents stay up late talking for weeks on end as he lies in bed pretending to be asleep.

They leave for Poland two weeks after his seventh birthday. (Max never sees either of his friends again. Rolf is killed when his house collapses in a bombing during the Battle of the Ruhr. Benno, a fanatical member of the _Hitlerjugend_ , joins the _Wehrmacht_ at sixteen and kills five men in the Battle of Caen. He is too young to be tried for war crimes and goes free. He marries a girl named Hanna and they have five daughters. Benno dies peacefully in his sleep four days before his wife's birthday.)

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(This is where Max Eisenhardt ends and Erik Lehnsherr begins.)

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In 1935, they flee to Warsaw and in 1939, Germany follows them.

For four years the freshly renamed Lehnsherrs live in some semblance of peace. Money is scarce, but the fear of deportation or worse is almost completely. Franz works odd jobs around their neighborhood, painting houses and fixing leaky pipes. Edie works as a maid for a rich couple in Wilanów, and when times get tough, she goes to a wig shop and sells her beautiful long hair. It takes almost a year for him to accept that his new name is Erik. He becomes fluent in Polish and throws himself into school where he excels in arithmetic and writing.

Germany invades in September. His parents are terrified and at ten years old, Erik knows enough to be scared as well. They left Düsseldorf to escape persecution by the Nazis, but they cannot run away this time. Everyone tries to continue on as they had before, but there is a dark cloud hanging over everything they do, heavy and grim. The Jews of Warsaw wait for the axe to drop.

The Lehnsherr and almost 400,000 other Jews are forced into the ghetto, a four square kilometer section of the city that is unable to handle almost thirty percent of Warsaw's citizens. Food is hard to come by and disease is rampant. Erik joins a group of boys from his neighborhood and they sneak over to the Aryan side to steal food. His mother scolds him, but she cannot deny that the little bits he is able to pick up helps the family survive. 

(They are sent to the camps in 1942 after Mama's thirty-ninth birthday. They celebrate over some bread and cheese. She never makes it to forty.)

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(Little Erik Lehnsherr bends a gate and suddenly he is not so little anymore.)

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At the end of each session, Schmidt tells him that he hates to see Erik in so much pain, but the pain will make Erik stronger. "Someday when you great and powerful," he says to the broken boy, "You will thank me for what I've done." If he can manage it, Erik tries to spit blood into the older man's face.

He calls Erik, " _Mein Sohn_ ," and pats him on the head.

For Erik's sixteenth birthday, Schmidt makes him a _Sonderkommando_ , one of the men and women who lead the other Jews into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies. It is the not the first time he tries to kill the older man, but he almost finishes the job before the guards knock him unconscious.

There are very few things Erik is ashamed of in his life. This is one of them.

He meets Magda three months before the riot, but those three months bonded them together for the rest of their lives. She is a gypsy from Győr with a fair grasp of the German language. Her parents died on the train to Auschwitz, her mother from starvation, her father from heartbreak. Erik tells her about his job and even though she is horrified, she does not blame him for what he is forced to do. His love for her is strong and pure.

The _Sonderkommandos_ are kept separate from the other inmates in isolated barracks, but the others are willing to cover for him when he sneaks out to see Magda. There is no room for judgement between them. They all lead people into the chambers, they all burn the bodies, and they all pick over the dead's belongings for food and cigarettes. The only way out is suicide, but Erik fears what would happen to Magda or the others if he killed himself. Schmidt would be incensed and no doubt many would pay the price for Erik's actions.

It comes down from the resistance forming among the inmates that they are to be sent to another camp, the saying the guards use when a group is going to be gassed. Several of the women have snuck in gunpowder in cloth and pieces of paper and in the morning, they unleash Hell.

He helps in the initial attack against the guards. He kills one man before leaving the others to fight for their lives. (The revolt is unsuccessful. Three SS guards die, including the one he kills, and 250 inmates are shot in the back of the head.) Erik finds Magda in her barracks and they run through the mud and over the barbed wire fences.

They don't stop running until they reach Ukraine and for the first time in  five years, Erik breathes easy.

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(This is where Erik Lehnsherr takes a pause and where Magnus comes to life.)

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She has ten wonderful fingers and ten beautiful toes that curl around his finger. Her eyes are a clear green that reminds Magnus of spring and she has a small tuft of red-brown hair that matches her mother's. He can hold her on the line of his forearm, her skull fitting perfectly in his palm. The mobile above her crib is made from scrap metal he molded into tiny stars. Her name is Anya and she is _perfektion_.

He finds work as an electrician and soon word of his skills spread. Magnus the Pole can fix anything you need. He follows the wiring, running his hands down the walls until he finds the problem. It is almost like he can _feel_ whatever is wrong. He almost puts his main competition, Oleg Shevchenko, out of business, but Oleg is too drunk to care about Magnus.

His son, Arkadi, does care. He cares enough to break into Magnus's house, turn on his gas stove, and light a match while Anya and the old woman who watches her sleep in the next room.

He left the house to pick Magda up from work across town and when they return home, their house is sizzling, charred rubble. A mob has formed in front of the debris. Someone says there were no survivors and Magnus's ears ring with Magda's screams.

Time stops. Grief takes hold. He feels the pipes beneath his feet, lamps lining the street, and they flow through him to the others.

He kills them all.

They leave Ukraine, but nothing is ever the same between them again. Both of them are consumed by their grief. He can tell Magda is scared of him and his powers, but she is more scared of what he would do if she leaves. They stay together for seven more years before she works up the courage to walk out of his life.

It occurs to him then that his life is a never-ending cycle of pain and death  that began when he was born and will end when he dies. Magnus finds himself alone in a hotel room, the first of many hotel rooms over the next eight years, and in those dark hours, he makes himself a promise. He will hunt Klaus Schmidt to the ends of the Earth and he will kill him. And then, when all is said and done, he will kill himself.

(He returns to Düsseldorf to see his old neighborhood before he begins his hunt. No one there recognizes him. Magnus thinks about looking for Rolf and Benno, but, to his dismay, he does not remember their surnames. He hopes they are still alive and well.)

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(This is where Magnus dies and where Erik Lehnsherr becomes the man Klaus Schmidt envisioned he could be. And for that, Erik does thank him.)

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(But this is not the end of the story. Because Erik does not know about the man who lived in the house behind Magnus. The man who saw the house going up in flames and went into the burning house because he heard crying from inside. The man who found a dead old woman and a burned baby. The man who took the baby and delivered her to the nearest hospital. The man who saved Anya.)

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The one thing Ninel knows about herself is she is ugly.

Her scar covers the right side of her face and neck and trails down her arm and side before stopping above her hip. It has bumps and ridges all the way down, and it feels tight if she forgets to put on her cream. Ninel cannot remember the fire that gave her this scar; she was a baby when it occurred. According to Pavel, an older boy at the school who uses a wheelchair, her parents were enemies of the people who burned down their home so they could fake their deaths and escape the NKVD. Pavel would know. He was living at the orphanage when Ninel came to them and the teachers kept gossiping about the little burned girl. Pavel told her that she came from Moscow, from the big hospital with the special ward for babies, but he does not know where she is from originally.

Adults are kind to innocent disfigured children. Other children are not.

(Not that the other children here are perfect. This is the school where they send the crippled and the dumb.)

The other children whisper about her scars behind her back and call her hideous to her face. Ninel hears it so often she accepts it as fact. She is ugly. It is part of who she is as a person as much as her hair color or her nose are a part of her.

Some nights she goes to the bathroom and examines her face in the mirror for traces of her parents. She pulls at the tight skin on her cheek, squints at her tall forehead, and holds her eye open to investigate its color. It becomes a ritual, searching herself for clues that could lead her to her mother and father. Whose eyes does she have? Whose hair?

Ninel could search for herself in this mirror for hours.

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(The name the head nurse at the big hospital gave her is Ninel Konstantinova Zhuravleva. Most of the orphans at that time have patriotic names such as Vladlen or Dazdraperma, and she is no different: her's is Ilyich's name spelled backwards.

There is a large watercolor painting in the natal unit depicting a family of cranes. Nurse Koraleva can see it from her desk. Every orphan she names becomes a Zhuravlev and by the end of her career there is an entire flock of children named after cranes.)

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The Young Pioneers save Ninel. She joins her local chapter in the third grade, one of the few children from her school who actually can join. The oath she makes is a solemn one. She vows in front of her comrades to love the Motherland and follow the laws of the Soviet Union. The adults present burst into applause and congratulate all of the new members.

Ninel throws herself into the Pioneers. She creates her tiny atheist's corner by her bed and collects every issue of Pioneer's Truth. She works harder in school so she can qualify for awards. Her uniform is always straight and proper, her shirt always freshly starched. She attends every camp the Palace holds and joins various craft and sport clubs. Her scar insures that she cannot throw things far or stay out in the sun for long periods of time, but Ninel tries her best at everything she does. She works her way up the ranks and eventually becomes part of the governing body at her local Palace. Other children respect her and her work. Adults praise her for her service to the Union.

(The feeling of belonging is a marvelous thing for a child.)

When she is fifteen the other members vote to allow Ninel to join Komsomol. Her passion for writing in school proves useful and she begins reporting for _Komsomolskaya Pravda_. The first major story she covers is the Caribbean Crisis in Cuba.

(The other girls in her class are getting married and having children of their own, fulfilling the Soviet ideal of a loving mother. Ninel will never be the ideal Soviet woman. Her scars have made sure of that. The thought makes her stomach ache, so she throws herself into her career to make up for her failings.)

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(She no longer looks for herself or her absent parents in a mirror. The Motherland raised her and loved her. She is Ninel's mother and father.)

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Peter may be stupid, but he's not an idiot. He knows Dickface Erik is his real dad.

It's no secret he and Wanda are adopted. His bio mom came to America with her friend when she was pregnant with the twins. Peter remembers bits and pieces of their time together. She died in a car crash when he and his sister were two and a half. Her best friend, Marya Maximoff, takes them in as a tribute to Magda.

(Afterwards, Peter keeps finding pieces of Magneto in himself and Wanda. Her nose, his hands, their stance. Undeniable evidence of a shared history. He decides not to tell his sister just yet, partly to protect her, mostly so she doesn’t blow up the house.)

Despite Magneto's sudden popularity, there are almost no records of Erik Lensherr past 1962. Peter gives up on that part of the hunt and focuses on his mother's past instead. Magda Magnus immigrated to the US from Poland in 1954 but housing records tell him that she lived in Ukraine seven years before she left Europe. But this is where things get strange.

Because he finds a birth certificate for an Anya Magnus.

He manages get into Ukraine with a lump of cash he was saving for a new car. (He stole the whole lot at once, but he wants his mom to think he actually earned it with the job he lied about.) Peter finds the town, the neighborhood, the street where it all went down. Someone rebuilt the house years ago. He asks around the neighborhood and finally finds an old man who remembers the family who lived there.

“They very young,” he tells Peter in broken English. “Pretty baby. I take to hospital.”

Before Peter leaves, the old man warns him. “The boy. Very dangerous. Kill many people.”

(Nothing Peter doesn’t already know.)

Flirting with nurses gets him nowhere, but superhuman speed will. He sneaks into the file room and despite his shoddy grasp of the Ukrainian alphabet, manages to find a file the corresponds to the date of the fire. An unnamed baby arrived at the hospital in 1946 with severe burns on the right side of her body. After the baby miraculously survived she was sent to a larger hospital in Moscow for treatment.

Finding his big sister from there is easy. With the help of a few Russian-English dictionaries and enough money, he tracks her down to a _Pravda_ office in East Berlin. She’s certainly not what Peter expected: short and curvy instead of tall and slender like Wanda, taking after their mother’s side of the family. Her name is Ninel Zhuravleva and she is twenty-eight years old. She grew up in a boarding school for the disabled outside of Moscow. She’s a journalist, a really good one. Unmarried with no children or close friends. A lone wolf and a human too.

(The scar is off-putting. It covers a good portion of her face with ripples and grooves before dipping down to hide under her collar.)

He gathers everything he needs and calls the drunk hippie dude. “I need your help.”

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(Charles and the silver-haired boy find him hiding out in Cochabamba. Peter shows him the evidence he compiled and it is compelling. The dates coincide with the fire and the mystery baby had red hair and green eyes like Anya.

The photograph makes him ache. The young woman is built like Magda, but her eyes and face are all Edie Lehnsherr.)

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“ _Zhuravleva spricht_ ,” she says as she answers the telephone, talking around the cigarette in her mouth. Three years stationed in Germany has made her practically fluent in the language, but her pronunciation is by no means perfect. Ninel taps a few more keys on her typewriter to finish her sentence before grasping the receiver shoved between her neck and shoulder.

“Ninel Konstantinova Zhuravleva,” asks the man on the other line, his English accent butchering her name.

She furrows her brow in confusion. Why is an Englishman calling her? “Yes,” she continues in German. “Who is this?”

“My name is Charles Xavier,” the man says, “I know your father.”

“What are you talking about?” Ninel pulls her cigarette out of her mouth and exhales a plume of pale smoke. “I don’t have a father. I’m an orphan.”

The calm voice assures her over the phone, “No, you are not.”

He agrees to meet her at Weißer See on her lunch break. She tries to make an excuse to stay at the office, but part of her itches to find out what this man knows. At noon she wraps herself in her wool coat and scarf and treks out into the late October afternoon.

She finds him almost immediately upon arriving at the lake. He is younger than she thought and sits in a wheelchair. A boy with silver hair sits on a bench beside him. The Englishman waves her over to their spot. She is wary at first. The man seems very rugged with his long hair and scraggly beard and the boy is nearly vibrating with anticipation.

The man explains in terrible German that the boy’s name is Peter Maximoff, an American who was looking into his deceased mother’s past when he found Ninel’s original birth certificate. Peter, the man explains, is her younger brother.

Over the next half hour, Ninel’s life unravels around her. She learns she has a sister as well, Peter’s twin, and the two of them are mutants. She learns about her life in Ukraine before the fire. She learns her mother and father survived the Nazi camps before escaping when they were sixteen.

They give her pictures of her parents and for the first time, Ninel sees her mother. She was beautiful.

She balks when she sees her father. Everyone in the world knows who Magneto is after the incident at the White House that spring. “But I’m not a mutant.”

“Sometimes the gene gets switched on, sometimes it doesn’t,” Xavier tells her. “He wants to meet you.”

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(Ninel goes home and stands naked in front of the mirror, and she finally sees her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes. For the first time in her life, she is a sum of parts and not a seamless figure.)

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The morning of the meeting she pulls out her old Pioneers uniform and pockets the red neckerchief. It is a small comfort in the face of what is coming for her. Ninel feels guilty as she packs the uniform away. Where is the girl who said the Motherland was the only parent she needed? Where is the girl who stopped trying to find herself in other people?

She is the first person to arrive at the office and the last to leave for lunch. Ninel finishes her big story on the fighting in the Middle East before packing up her things. She takes her time to leave the building and walk to a different train station. It is a longer route than necessary with two transfers, but it gives her time to think. Wrapping the red scarf around her hand, she anxiously threads it through her fingers. What if he does not speak German? What if he only knows English? Ninel speaks enough to ask a few questions, but she is nowhere near fluent.

(What is he hates her? Its no secret that Magneto desires the end of humanity and the rise of mutantkind.)

Peter and Xavier meet her at the train station, their bright Western clothes standing out in the crowd. “He’s waiting for you at the bench where we met yesterday,” the older man tells her. “He’s very eager to see you.” His smile is reassuring. It does not help. Ninel pulls her coat tighter around herself and treks onward to the lake. He is eager to see her. That must be a good sign. She reminds herself that he would not have set up a meeting if he did not want anything to do with her.

A few people mill around the lake, mostly young mothers and their children. A little boy trips and falls on the grass and he cries out to his mother. His pained yowl is echoed inside of Ninel. She is terrified.

(This is something she always dreamed of, and it is nothing like she thought.)

He sits on the same bench as yesterday and he must be looking for her as well because he stands up when he sees her. Her father is very young, Ninel realizes, only twenty or so years older than herself. She can see his resemblance to Peter clearly now too. They have the same tall frame and slender build, traits she lacks. His eyes are wide in what she can only describe as fright. Ninel squeezes the scarf in her pocket so tightly her hand aches.

Her father’s first words to her are wonderful. “ _Mien Gott_. You look exactly like your grandmother.”

Her first words to him are spoken in surprise. “You speak German very well.”

“I am German,” he tells her, staring at her intently. “I was born here. My parents were from Düsseldorf.”

(German. Ninel is German. Well, at least half.)

Ninel stares right back at him. “And my mother?”

“Hungarian. Her family lived near Győr.” He stutters over the words. He is as nervous as she is. “They were gypsies.”

(German and gypsy. A shared history with a group of people. This is more than she could ever dream.)

“I suppose it was fitting for me to come here,” she says to him, squinting in the brights sunlight. “Seeing as I’m now German.”

He smiles for the first time. His teeth are straight and white and strong. “Yes,” he laughs, “I suppose it was.”

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(He tells her to call him Erik. She tells him to call her Ninel.)

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For so long she existed only in his mind and now she is here, and she is everything and nothing he imagined.

She hates dogs and she loves cats. Her nose crinkles when she thinks hard about something. She taught herself to write with her left hand when she realized her right hand would always be slower due to her scar. Her patronymic name came from the headmaster at the boarding school where she grew up. She is the youngest journalist at her office by almost ten years and she loves it when he says she reminds him of her mother. Ninel (Anya, his mind whispers) is smart and funny and extremely clever.

She is also extremely closed off. She does not talk about her childhood if it can be avoided. He does not know where she lives or if she is married. She hates talking about her scar.

He asks her once, “Does it hurt?”

(She knows what he means.)

“Not anymore,” she assures him.

(He understands.)

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(To be fair, he does not tell her anything about his life before he and Magda escaped the camp. It is the first time he protects his daughter and it feels right.)

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(All fairytales end.)

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He wants her to come to America with him and Peter. She politely refuses. She spent her whole life in the Soviet Union and she cannot fathom leaving. She loves her job here in Berlin. Why would she leave?

Erik is not pleased. Clearly he thought she would jump at the chance to leave. “We just found each other,” he exclaims, “And you want me to leave you here.”

Ninel glares at an older man who is giving their table a funny look before turning back to him. “Why do you have to leave? You could find an apartment in the West. Or you could live with me.”

“It’s too risky for me to stay in one place for too long.” Erik takes a sip of his tea. “There are people looking for me.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me who’s after you, you can’t tell me where you’re going,” Ninel snaps. “I don’t know a single thing about you.”

Erik straightens his spine defensively. ‘You’re one to talk.”

“I’m trying,” she snips. “Unlike somebody.”

“Don’t say that to me. At least I know how to be part of a family.” He regrets the words as soon as they come out of his mouth. Ninel jerks back like she has been slapped. He has hurt her. This is the first time he hurts his daughter.

Her green eyes turn cold, a patent Lehnsherr glare, and she begins to gather her things. “Have fun in America,” Ninel spits. “Go see your other daughter. Try not to disappoint her too much.” She storms out of the restaurant without another word.

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(He is right. She has no idea.)

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They avoid each other like the plague. When Peter and Xavier meet her for dinner, Ninel pointedly ignores any mention of Erik or America and changes the subject. They talk about Wanda and Professor Xavier's work with mutant children. She learns about Wanda's powers, and her brother demonstrates his own on an empty street one night. One moment her scarf is around her neck and the next it is tied in a pretty bow on a street lamp.

(Her relationship with her brother is strange. Even though she is the older of the two of them he acts as the leader. She ignores the excited feeling having a little brother gives her.)

One afternoon Peter comes to her and says something in English that Xavier translates as, "We're leaving the day after tomorrow."

She cannot name the feeling that crashes over her. It feels like terror and sadness mixed together with a dash of guilt. It leaves her breathless. "Oh."

Xavier gives her a sympathetic look. "You should see him before he goes."

Ninel sinks down on the bench next to Peter who wraps an arm around her shoulders. "I don't know if I can do that," she tells the professor. "I said terrible things to him."

"I know," Xavier says and rests his hand on her knee, "And he said some horrible things to you. He feels terrible." She looks at him, feeling lost once again. The professor stares back at her with his bright blue eyes and adds, "Don't let it end like this."

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(This has been too long coming for it to end here.)

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His daughter lives in a large apartment block near the center of Berlin. The building is a cold grey concrete and it reminds Erik of the buildings in the center of the camp. He pushes the thought out pf his mind as soon as it comes to him. He does not want to associate Ninel (Anya, Anya, Anya) with that part of his life. He climbs the narrow stairs to her apartment on the fifth floor. A gaggle of children race past him in the hall and Erik moves at the last moment to avoid them.

Her hair is down when she opens the door which surprises him. In their previous meeting her hair stayed up in a stiff bun. Now it lies on her shoulders prettily, the ends curling up like it did when she was a baby. Erik remembers being seventeen and raking his fingers through that hair on many sleepless nights. He used to plead to her for her cries to stop, exhausted after a long days work. Some nights she went right to sleep and other nights he would take her to bed with him and Magda.

(What he would give to go back to that.)

Ninel invites him into her small apartment. She lives alone, he realizes. No husband, no children. Two photographs hang on the wall: one depicts a group of children dressed in identical uniforms, and the other is a picture of Magda with the twins sitting on her lap. The living room has just been cleaned and a tea kettle sits steaming on the stove. He sits down in her only armchair. "Do you have a boyfriend," Erik asks.

She looks like a startled deer about to be hit by a car. "No. Most men don't want a woman who looks like this." Ninel gestures to her face to point out her scar.

"They are fools if they don't see how beautiful you are," he tells her erenstly. She blushes at the compliment and moves to the kitchen to make tea. Ninel moves awkwardly around her kitchen. The scar limits her range of motion on the right side of her body. She uses her left arm to reach for things on high shelves, and she must squat sightly to place the cups on the low coffee table instead of bending over.

They sip their drinks in silence for a few minutes before she sets her cup on its saucer. "Erik-"

"Max," he says, interrupting her. Ninel looks at him sharply, green piercing green. He sees his mother scolding him for sneaking out of the ghetto. Erik continues. "My real name is Max."

"I thought your name was Erik."

"Erik Lehnsherr is the name my parents gave me when we fled to Poland." Her stare makes him feel uncomfortable. "I was seven when we left. Before that, my name was Max Eisenhardt." God, she looks like his mother. He pushes down a sudden tidal wave of panic. Telling his story goes against everything Erik knows. "Your name should have been Anya Maximovna, but we- your mother and I, I mean- we were in hiding, so we gave you her father's name instead."

Ninel shifts closer to him from her seat on the couch. "Why were you in hiding?"

Erik looks down at his lap where his hands are linked together. "My mutation manifested in the camp. One of the scientists there was a mutant as well and he-" He cuts off his sentence to take a deep breath and glance up at the ceiling. A soft weight settles on his hands. Ninel's palms are soft but her fingertips are calloused from years of typing away at a typewriter. His next breath is a shuttering one, and he moves his hands to encompass her's. "He wanted to do terrible things with my powers. I was terrified he would find us.”

“Is he still looking for you?”

“I killed him.”

Her grip on his hands tighten. “Good.”

Erik lets out a breathy, humorous laugh. “After you died, I was angry,” he confesses, “I still am. Angry that you were taken from me, angry about what was done to me. It changed me and not for the better, I’m afraid. Sometimes that anger is the only thing that feels real in this world.”

“I understand,” Ninel blurts out awkwardly. She flushes a deep red and stammers her next part. “Feeling that way. I used to think I would be alone until the end of time with my writings and my scar.” He rubs her fingers with his own for encouragement. “You were right. I don’t know how to be part of a family. But I want to learn.”

“Will you come to America with us,” Erik asks once again.

“No,” she says, “Not yet. There are still things I need to do here. But, someday, I will go with you.”

(His embrace is so tight he is afraid he will break her in two.)

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(She gives him a square of red cloth to remember her. He gives her a coin. Sharing their burdens as families should.)

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(They will both be fine. They both survive because surviving is what Eisenhardts do.)

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Fin

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**Author's Note:**

> Follow me at thedjthundercat.tumblr.com to see a fangirl flail around on the Internet.


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